Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust

12: “Stoning the Messenger”

chapter @ 12 “Stoning the Messenger” Yehiel Dinur’s House of Dolls and Piepel MIRYAM SIVAN Since the end of World War II, fiction has sometimes filled the lacunae of historical documentation and discourse regarding Jewish sexual slavery and abuse during the Holocaust. Rachel Lev-Wiesel and Marianne Amir, who have studied the sexual abuse of Jewish children during the war, claim that by ignoring this critical piece of the historical puzzle, some scholars have been able to avoid their “own feelings of fear, helplessness, and horror in dealing with such life stories.”1 Because “men of a conquered nation traditionally view the rape of ‘their women’ as the ultimate humiliation, a sexual coup de grace,”2 according to Susan Brownmiller, rape has come to represent literally, figuratively, and allegorically the depths of an individual’s and a nation’s helplessness. For Jews the connection between sexual violation and existential powerlessness is seeded in the Bible. In Genesis 12:10–20, Abram takes his entourage down to Egypt during a season of famine. On the way, he instructs his beautiful wife, Sarai, to tell the Egyptians that she is his sister, for if she pleases Pharaoh, he will have the husband, Abram, killed. Taking the husband’s life was acceptable in order for his wife to then be violated sexually. Sarai was indeed taken into Pharaoh’s palace, where she remained for some time, and Abram was compensated financially. The story continues that plagues descended upon Pharaoh’s house. One rabbinic commentary explains that Pharaoh was struck with impotence, and his lust for Sarai was not consummated.3 Other commentaries say Pharaoh su=ered leprosy or venereal disease, medical conditions that also could have prevented him from having sex with Sarai.4 As we see here, the obfuscation of rape is not a modern invention. Stoning the Messenger | 201 Modes of Understanding—Inside and Outside of Israel There is a marked di=erence in the way writers and readers inside and outside of Israel have dealt with the fact of sexual abuse of women and children during the Holocaust. For Israelis, the allegorical model of sexual violation as an extreme form of Diaspora vulnerability seems obvious and from their reconstituted position of political and military agency, enraging, but not existentially threatening. The emphasis in the culture that raised them is not on impotence, but on durability, resilience, and fortitude. For many Jews in the Diaspora, however, rape and sexual slavery are so intimidating that they continue to be cloaked in denial, and when they are mentioned at all, even in fiction, they are referred to only euphemistically.5 I do not condone the reductive analysis of a “feminized,” passive, and weak Diaspora and a “masculine,” active, and strong Israel and, of course, do not abide by the conflation of feminization with weakness. However, I also do not think it coincidental that the image of a Jewish woman forced into sexual slavery in Palmach founder Yitzhak Sadeh’s poem “My Sister on the Beach” became the symbol of Jewish ravishment in Europe, and a rallying cry in the nascent Israeli state’s fight for independence.6 Written in 1945, the poem’s speaker is a young fighter who describes a young female survivor and vows to do everything in his power to protect her. The poem begins: Darkness. On wet sand my sister stands before me: dirty, Disheveled. Matted hair. Her feet bare and her head lowered. She Stands and sobs. I know: she is tattooed: “for o